


The Impossible Woman

by YamiTami



Category: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
Genre: End of Series One Spoilers, Gen, Introspection, One-Sided Attraction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-08
Updated: 2014-06-08
Packaged: 2018-02-03 20:54:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1756795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YamiTami/pseuds/YamiTami
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nearly from the very first moment he met her Jack Robinson wished dearly that someone would put the Honorable and impossible Miss Phryne Fisher in her place.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Impossible Woman

Nearly from the very first moment he met her Jack Robinson wished dearly that someone would put the Honorable and impossible Miss Phryne Fisher in her place.

At first he thought that he might be the one for the job, given that she was intruding on his crime scene and he was the Detective Inspector, but she remained infuriatingly immune to every suggestion that she keep her nose in her own business. When he first learned that she had declared herself a lady detective Jack felt himself in the grips of a sinking feeling and a headache with a name spelt P-H-R-Y-N-E, please. However, as her observations proved valid time and time again Jack developed a grudging respect for the impossible woman, which is how he came to allow her privileges with crime scenes he’d not dreamed of ever granting a civilian prior to his acquaintance with her.

He still wished someone would make her flinch. Just to see her frazzled, for once, in retribution for all the times she frazzled him. 

Time carried on, cases came and went, and even in the most bizarre and dangerous situations Phryne refused to be more than slightly ruffled. It wasn’t that she was completely inhuman—she winced when she hit the ground hard and she was would show her distress if someone other than herself was in danger—but there was just no sense of respect to the woman. Jack would no sooner think that than he’d take it back. Phryne had a great respect for the people she deemed worthy of it, and that inspired the incredible loyalty her staff felt for her. She was far more than just their employer. Somewhat reluctantly, Jack could see some parallels between that dynamic and the one he shared with his loyal officers. It wasn’t really a great surprise when he learned that she’d seen the War as well. The only part that gave him pause was learning she worked in an ambulance unit and not as a daring female spy. Sometimes, when Jack felt particularly fanciful, he’d wonder if the ambulance unit was a cover. Then he’d realize he was so used to her being nothing than glamour itself that he was inventing a more glamorous past for her even as he searched for some thread of normal in the infuriating Miss Fisher.

Perhaps what irked Jack the most was how Phryne reacted to shocking news. Insightful though she was there were still things that threw her for a loop on a case, and sometimes it was Jack’s delight to be the one to deliver those little tidbits. Still, even when she was taken aback it only elicited a pause and a surprised ‘Oh?’. Then she’d be right on rolling again, or so it always seemed. It also always seemed that when she was the one to blow a hole in Jack’s theory he’d spend an hour gaping at her before regaining his composure. Whatever sense of cosmic fairness Jack had carried into adulthood he’d left shattered to pieces in no man’s land, but sometimes he’d catch himself thinking that it wasn’t fair that she could twist him so easily while he could barely make her lose beat for a moment, if even that. 

Jack was fully aware that it was uncharacteristically childish of him to wish it, but wish it he did. He’d given up all hope of it being him, but he just wanted to _be there_ when someone finally put Miss Phryne Fisher in her place. 

Jack found the wish granted, in part, when the details of a case caught her truly off guard. But then again, he could hardly blame her given the details. To learn that the only witnesses to the death of her French friend were three servicemen from her own Australia, well, that would be a coincidence enough to raise an eyebrow. But for one of them to have been her very own Bert... Jack left his faith in God and belief in fate in those muddy miserable trenches, but this unhappy coincidence was almost enough to make him reconsider. Perhaps it was simply the case that it wasn’t a benevolent God. It was a cruel twist of the knife to have had the key to solving her friend’s murder in her employ, in her house. A sadistic God, now, that Jack might be able to accept.

It puzzled him that she knew with was this René even before Bert confirmed it, but then again, he didn’t know what subtleties Phryne had seen in her days back in France. Perhaps there was some undercurrent of jealousy at the artist’s skills at play. He didn’t yet know the depth of the cruelty coming back from Phryne’s past in France. If he had he never would have invited her to come to that café.

When Jack drove to Phryne’s house to pick her up for the sting on René, Dorothy met him in the parlor and asked him to be as careful as he could with the painting that René had stolen from the house. It gave him pause, then, to learn that Phryne knew this late painter Pierre because she had been his model and that the missing painting was the very one she sat for. Also that it was the painting that Pierre had been killed over. Jack wondered if that was part of what had Phryne so on edge, so much more than any other case they’d ever worked, wondered if she was assigning some of the blame to herself because she was the subject matter of this painting. It was the sort of baseless guilt that many reasonable people would suffer from time to time. Perhaps it could strike the unreasonable as well. But he could deal with Phryne dealing with her mild unease.

What Jack saw at the café was anything but mild. He expected her to be a little more high strung than usual, given that she was about to solve the decade-cold murder of Pierre and avenger the treatment of her dear friend Véronique at the same time—Jack was not going to be gentle with the cuffs, he loathed all crime but a man who beat his woman was one of those that rubbed him wrong in a different way—but the unflappable Miss Fisher was downright _skittish_. Jack willingly ate the damn snails in the hopes that it would lighten the mood, make her smile, prompt some teasing quip, but she remained every bit as jumpy. He shifted their positions so that René wouldn’t see her at the door and run, but then like an outright fool she kept turning her whole body to look at the door. Phryne Fisher did a number of foolish things, often two before breakfast, but never something as downright stupid as this. Jack asked her to be in the café because he needed someone to indentify René, though if he was being honest he’d have to admit that he thought that she’d appreciate being there to see her friend’s murder brought down. He thought she’d never endanger the arrest when justice was so close. And that is how he came to be sitting at a table eating pieces of leather—godforsaken French cuisine—with a woman who seemed to be doing her level best to panic René straight out of the noose. Jack wracked his brain trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with her all while trying to calm her down and to keep an eye on the operation.

He just didn’t understand it.

Jack needn’t ask when René came in the door. Phryne’s sharp intake of breath said it all. Her eyes were riveted on the man, which was going to give him a plain view of her face as soon as he glanced to their corner of the café. In the space of an instant Jack thought of all the reasons a man would have to suddenly grab the attention of the woman he was dining with and he went for the first viable option that came to mind. He didn’t feel guilty about kissing her—dear Dot was a girl you felt guilty about kissing for the sake of a ruse, Phryne Fisher was not. It was barely a kiss, in any case, an awkward mash of mostly closed mouths with one party distracted by her worries and the other distracted by the operation. It also distracted a certain constable whose wide eyes were met by Jack’s, but a couple seconds of an unflinching stare and Collins was shaking himself from his stupor and focusing his attention back on their target.

Phryne, for her part, seemed to have been jolted from the worst of her lunacy. When they first parted Jack and Phryne looked at each other and... it was not entirely awkward. Decidedly not comfortable, to be sure, but not completely awful. There was a beat where Jack wondered if he’d gone too far even if Phryne wasn’t Dot, but then there was the briefest flash of annoyance. For all that she was a mystery Jack had picked up the skill of reading her expressions, and this one was a close cousin of the look of self-directed disappointment she’d wear when she discovered she missed something. The space of a breath is all he spared to be relieved that the Earth didn’t crack in two when their lips met and then Jack directed his attention to the thief and murderer sitting across the room.

When Bert and Cecil arrived to throw a wrench in the plan it was not of particular surprise to Jack; it was simply in their nature, it seemed. When it came to blows and Phryne threw herself between Bert and René it was of no particular surprise, either; two men had already died on the present continent and Phryne cared deeply about her household. When René got hold of Phryne and used her as a shield it was the slightest surprise that she’d let herself be grabbed, but then again he was taller and likely stronger than her and she was distracted by her concern for Bert.

Then René turned her to face him. Then the world stopped still. Then the barrel of that long gun was pressed to the underside of Phryne’s chin and Jack wasted a precious handful of seconds staring at the arm holding Phryne in place, the arm so comfortably situated around her waist as though it had been there before, Jack thought of that poor woman left to die in a hotel room, thought of Phryne alone in a foreign country after she was ripped apart in her own trenches, and he raised his gaze again to truly take in the terror filling the eyes of the independent, impossible, maddening Miss Phryne Fisher.

Jack was so used to her as she was, this strong, confident woman, that he never thought to think that Phryne might have once been less than what she was.

And he could do nothing but watch as she got the gun. As she pressed it to her abuser’s chest. Her shoulders were hunched, her hands were shaking, and there were tears in her eyes when she told him that she wasn’t afraid of him. Yet it wasn’t a lie. She stood her ground and faced down the man who preyed on the weaknesses of her past and Jack had always assumed that it was the blood of her sister that made Phryne so fierce when protecting women, but now he knew that it was Phryne’s own blood as well.

Jack believed in a fair trial. The system had its faults but it was a fair sight better than vigilante justice. But, even so, he just couldn’t make himself regret the way René Dubois ended. One beaten woman stood up to him and he ran into the knife of the other... Jack wasn’t completely sure about how accidental that death was but he couldn’t possibly press that matter. If nothing else Véronique was acting in defense of Phryne and Jack couldn’t fault her for that.

Who he could fault, though, was himself for not seeing it. He _knew_ the look of a beaten woman, he knew the twitch and the quiet downturned eyes and he should have known it when he saw Phryne wear it. He never should have asked her to face her abuser. It made horrible sense, watching her watch René die, why she was so guilty. To René she was his possession and then another man had painted her. In that finished canvas Pierre possessed a fragment of Phryne that René couldn’t claim, so he tried to claim it anyway.

It turned Jack’s stomach to think of any woman under the fist of that sort of barbaric possession, whether it came with a fist or not. To think of it being Phryne... he regretted ever once thinking that he’d like to see her flinch.

Once René drew his last breath Jack quickly set his constables to their usual duties in such a case. Véronique sat to the side being comforted by her fellow countryman and Phryne stared into René’s glassy eyes until Bert laid a bandaged hand on her shoulder. She shook herself and then covered Bert’s hand with her own before rising. A few deep breaths and she was once again composed. Jack knew her well enough to see the cracks, so he sent Collins to interview her first. Then Cecil, and then Bert, and then the two cabbies drove Miss Fisher home while Jack stayed at the café trying to sort out the mess that spanned continents and oceans.

Never did a release of evidence go through as quickly as it did then. The ink wasn’t even dry on the forms and Jack was personally escorting the stolen painting back to its rightful owner. The cracks were gone by the time he sat down in her parlor, though she was wary. Jack was as well, but it seemed that her wariness was down to the worry that he’d see her differently, knowing what René really was to her. It made sense she’d feel ashamed—she never told Jack that René had been her lover and she wasn’t one to shy away from admitting things about her love life from ten years ago—but she needn’t have worried. Jack found he respected her even more than he already did. To be born with such resilience, that was impressive enough, but to have clawed one’s way out from a deep pit, now that was another matter entirely.

By the time she was unwrapping the brown paper the wariness had vanished. Jack’s, however, was still present, though it had taken a different shape. She was wearing the coy look that meant she was about to annoy him in some way. He welcomed the return to their version of normalcy, even though whatever she was about to do was sure to irk him.

The paper came off and for a second or two he took in the composition and the brushwork and was on his way to saying that her old friend was certainly a stellar artist. Then he realized that Phryne’s relationship with the late Pierre Sarcelle was at least in part business. Because there she was all long hair and pale skin stretched out decadently on a pile of richly colored fabrics.

It wasn’t the first female nude Jack had seen, in painted or flesh form. Really, it shouldn’t have cost him more than a moment’s surprise and then a dry roll of the eyes because _naturally_ the woman had a nude painting depicting herself and of course the painting was the source of a ridiculous amount of trouble. And it was a matter of course that she’d reveal it to him with that damnable look on her face.

But Jack just couldn’t shake the fear in Phryne’s eyes. He couldn’t lose that image of her trembling hands and her defiant assertion that she wasn’t afraid of René Dubois. Looking at that painting of Phryne... if he’d seen it three days prior then he would have thought little of it. Of course the Honorable Miss Phryne Fisher would pose sans clothing for a painter in Paris, of course she’d bear not an ounce of shame, of course she’d parade the painting out to annoy him. But this wasn’t three days prior. Now that Jack knew what he knew about her time in Paris, that while she was spread out for her friend’s canvas she was also being hounded by that piece of trash...

He paused overlong and Phryne noticed, though she seemed to mistake it for a blush. Jack had to suppress a sigh of relief. This... thing they had going, this partnership, her flirting was always a non-negotiable part of the deal due to the woman being impossible. And Jack got used to it easy enough once he realized that flirting was just in her nature. As far as Jack could tell Phryne had no interest in the fairer sex and yet he once bore uncomfortable witness to her and her best friend being downright obscene with each other. When Phryne flirted with Jack it was just another layer of the verbal sparring that was a central part of their working relationship.

But now, having seen that look in her eyes, knowing how vulnerable the indomitable Miss Fisher could be... it made her human. As much as Jack wanted to see her trip up in spite of himself he’d come to think of her as a well dressed storm of bad ideas and clever insights. But now, now, he couldn’t help but see her as a woman. He couldn’t help but see her differently.

Things were awkward the next time they saw each other, or at least, Jack was awkward. Phryne was her usual invasive and irritating self, though once she’d left the office he found himself relieved for her bluntness. She dragged his issue with the kiss out into the open kicking and screaming and it was hardly pleasant but it was over with and he was able to regain his balance. The rest of that case was as easy as they came for Jack and Phryne, which is to say not very, but at least they had fallen back into their old dynamic.

Then came the proposed deal when she asked for his advice.

Then came the circus and the shattered look when she though she’d never find out what happened to her sister.

Then came the toffee apple and she wore her foolish fears on her sleeve.

Then came the discovery that her fears weren’t so foolish.

Then came the bottle of milk and her frantic terror.

Then came a goblet of poison and a knife she refused to use.

Then came a breakneck drive to the hospital.

Then came a full recovery.

Then came a chat in her kitchen on her birthday.

Then Jack Robinson watched the Honorable Miss Phryne Fisher dance in her parlor for both herself and her sister. He looked around at all the people whose lives she’d touched. There was Dorothy, once upon a time terrified of a telephone and now infiltrating factories with more finesse for undercover work than most of his constables possessed. Cec and Alice were holding hands and giggling into their champagne. Bert, though he was a red ragger through and through, was grinning at this woman of means for whom he gladly worked. And Jane, fierce, intelligent, wonderful spitfire of a girl who never would have had the chance to learn about mummies if her life had taken a different turn.

And then there was a certain detective inspector leaning against a doorway and sipping a drink while contemplating the way his life had been turned upside down by this impossible woman. Just like everyone else in the room he’d never be the same. Before he was faded like a shirt that had been washed too many times in harsh soap, but knowing her brought the color back to his life. Wild, dangerous color, but still. He was better off for knowing her.

Jack admitted to himself that what he felt for her went far beyond professional friendship and deep gratitude. He accepted his feelings and he accepted that he couldn’t voice them. He knew there was more to a romance than chemistry and that she and he had two very different ideas of what romance meant. But even knowing that didn’t dampen the soft smile he wore as he watched Phryne dance.

It was impossible not to love this impossible woman.


End file.
